Trendsetters of the Left: They Bear the Weight of Past scandals and Win Few Readers, Yet They Powerfully Influence Popular Media and Academe

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The “little magazines” of the Left lose money and enjoy small readerships, but they help shape nearly everything an American sees on TV, at the movies, or in the popular press. They also influence what your children will be taught in college and grade school. And yet these journals have checkered pasts that include underpaying their own workers (even as they decry “greedy capitalists”), fabricating stories from whole cloth, apologizing for Stalin, and sometimes even spying for the Soviets.